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Join our excellent research team!
We offer a rewarding and challenging job in an international R&D environment within the exciting field of offshore wind energy. We strive for academic research with a high industrial relevance and valorization potential. You will join a young and dynamic research team, in an environment characterized by collegial respect and academic freedom.
Our current projects offer several open PhD and Post-doc positions, all highly relevant to a growing industry. Topics cover several domains including both civil and mechanical engineering topics such as:
- soil structure interaction
- structural dynamics
- fatigue
- reliability
..but also applied data-science such as signal processing, machine learning, IOT sensing technologies, digital twins, …
Pioneers in researching offshore foundation structures
OWI-lab was founded in 2010 by Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and Sirris, and recently Ghent University joined us, to support R&D in the field of offshore wind energy within Belgium. VUB is currently the scientific coordinator of OWI-lab. The main goal of OWI-lab (VUB) is to conduct research in the field of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of offshore foundation structures. Over the past years OWI-lab has pioneered test and monitoring equipment, data-warehousing solutions and advanced data analysis methods for the offshore wind industry. Currently OWI-lab (VUB) operates monitoring equipment on a large number of offshore wind turbines in the Belgian North Sea, primarily targeting design optimization and load & lifetime assessment. These experiments have been operational since 2011 and are still ongoing. In total, the equivalent of 20 years of data is now part of the OWI-lab database. In 2016 OWI-lab (VUB) also launched its first spin-off company: 24SEA. Today 24SEA is a leading provider of structural health monitoring services for the offshore wind market, with activities not only in Belgium but also in the UK, The Netherlands, France, Germany and Taiwan. This demonstrates the high valorization values of our research.
Through our industrial partners OWI-lab operates today’s largest offshore structural monitoring research database, which is exceptional thanks to the number of turbines, quality of sensors and longevity. This data allows our researchers to perform unique industrial relevant research in close cooperation with several offshore wind farm developers and operators.
Research focuses on 3 projects.
These are:
- Project Maxwind: lifetime and reliability assessment of offshore foundations.
- Project Soiltwin: structural monitoring and modal updating in the field of offshore foundations and soil structure interaction.
- Project Boptic: investigate and develop the potential of using distributed optical sensing technologies for structural health monitoring and model updating in a digital twin context.
We are looking forward to welcoming motivated and driven new members in our team. We have several open positions:
PhD-Scholarship OWI-lab: project Maxwind
PhD Scholarship OWI-lab: project Soiltwin
PhD-Scholarship OWI-lab: project Boptic
Post-Doc Researcher OWI-lab: project Maxwind
